Scholars and practitioners have long questioned whether the race, ethnicity, and gender of public bureaucrats matter to the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. Representative bureaucracy theory and research provide a growing body of empirical evidence that it does. This article examines some of the rich scholarly work that has been generated on representative bureaucracy and its implications for practice. A significant aspect of recent research focuses on the notion of symbolic representation, whereby the mere existence of a passively represented bureaucracy can itself improve outcomes by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of clients, regardless of bureaucratic actions or results. This article is intended to help both students and public managers understand the importance of representativeness in public organizations for a broad spectrum of practices and goals, from the coproduction of services to democratic rule.

What explains the failure of legislatures with strong constitutionally endowed powers to exert themselves over the executive in practice? We examine the role of legislator professionalization in strengthening the legislature's ability to constrain executive action, conceptualizing legislator professionalization as prior legislative experience and prior professional work experience. We argue that more professionalized legislators, through the skill and knowledge they bring to the policymaking process from prior experience, will be better equipped to challenge executive authority. In a sample of four Latin American countries from 1990 through 2010, we find that legislatures are more likely to curb executive decree issuance when individual legislators are strongly professionalized, controlling for constitutional powers and several other partisan and political factors. Our findings suggest that legislatures composed of more professionalized legislators can constrain executive action, especially in the context of a unified political opposition in the legislature.

This article has two objectives. The first objective is to review and assess the recent evolution of agency design in Colombia and Venezuela. More specifically, we study the agencies' formal autonomy in these two countries since the year 1999 when Venezuela experienced a major change in government policy towards socialism. Thus, we attempt to explore how this policy change is reflected in the formal autonomy of agencies. Our second objective is to test if, despite the differences in policy choices the two countries have taken in the recent years, there are theoretical factors related to the agencies' design that can explain the level of formal autonomy of the agencies. The results show two main elements: first, even though the patterns of formal agency autonomy in Colombia and Venezuela differed before Venezuela's latter policy change, the differences between these two countries have increased since 2000. This indicates that each country's policy preferences may account for the differences. Second, for both countries, we found that, despite the differences, agency level factors such as the primary tasks that are performed by the agencies and the policy sector in which they are active have had an impact on their level of formal autonomy. However, the results indicate that these relationships do not follow the predictions that have been made based on the different theoretical perspectives.

Over the past two decades, research on public service motivation has seen rapid growth. Despite the relatively large number of publications to date, no systematic research overview has been created, leaving the body of literature somewhat unstructured and possibly hampering future research. This article fills this void by providing a systematic literature review of 323 publications that examines six key aspects of the literature on public service motivation: the growth of research on the concept, the most prominent studies based on a referencing network analysis, the most frequent publication outlets, research designs and methods, lines of inquiry and patterns of empirical findings, and implications for practice drawn from the publications in the study sample. Strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature are identified, and future research directions are proposed.

This paper compiles and compares recent and past measures introduced to contain the public wage bill in a number of emerging and advanced economies to assess their effectiveness in bringing down expenditure in a sustained way. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, a number of countries have approved measures on the wage bill as part of fiscal consolidation efforts. These recent episodes are compared to past cases implemented in advanced economies over the period 1979–2009. Findings suggest that public wage bill consolidation episodes pre- and post-2009 are similar in many respects. Moreover, typically countries that were able to achieve more sustained reductions in the wage bill have implemented to larger extent structural measures, and/or these measures were accompanied with substantial social dialogue and consensus.

Based on previous inventories, the purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge on public administration experiments by focusing on their experimental type, design, sample type and realism levels and external validity. The aim is to provide an overview of experimental public administration and formulate potential ways forward.

This article is a contribution to the debate raised in the special issue of the International Review of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) (Volume 79(3)) devoted to the World Bank’s approach to public sector management for 2011–2020. We offer a methodological framework for action that builds on the definitions we have chosen of three key concepts used by several authors: ‘administrative reform’, the ‘real world’ and the ‘performance’ of administrations. The proposed model suggests an inductive-style methodological approach, taking into account the challenges that the World Bank has set itself to secure the successful implementation of its strategy.
Points for practitioners The success of administrative reforms very much depends on the consideration given to the different mechanisms that regulate the actual workflow in public services. The article shows how this flow is characterised by multiple methods of regulation whose nature and configuration vary from one administration to another, and offers a way of managing reforms that duly takes this into account. The focus is on the professionalism of the practitioners in this field

This chapter discusses management and leadership in public organizations and accentuates the approach oriented at the intellectual capital of the macro-organizational level. Network determinants of public leadership as well as information and disinformation in the management process have been delineated. Moreover, global examples of leadership crises have been offered, where no action or inappropriate reactions to a given crisis situation lead (or have led) to a reduction in the capacity of the current government to act. They have revealed the limited possibilities for exerting influence on the actual course of events, which diminished the already strained authority and, in consequence, resulted in delegitimation of authority to some extent. The chapter shows that people responsible for public governance must obtain, process, and use data and information both for the purposes of carrying out ongoing activity, orientated at performance of the delegated tasks, and efficient leadership. It takes place by way of conversion of data to information and information to knowledge which may serve leadership owing to the wisdom of a given decision maker. Nevertheless, data, information, and knowledge are often applied as part of mass disinformation of the society, which is intended to allow the government to keep its power, or takeover of power, or implement adverse solutions through the mechanism of relieving social tensions.

Civil service reforms over the last four decades have sought to provide new flexibilities to managers, particularly in relation to performance management. Reforms undertaken by many US states are consistent with this trend. State employees report these managerial flexibilities are decreasing perceptions of fairness. At the federal level, personnel reforms in the US Department of Defense also sought to increase managerial discretion. Defense identified employee perceptions of fairness as key to the successful implementation of the system. This study examines changes in fairness perceptions in response to civil service reforms at Defense in three distinct ways. First, procedural justice perceptions are examined before, during, and after repeal of the personnel reforms. Second, we consider whether the procedural justice perceptions of employees and managers are different over the time periods. Procedural justice research includes few studies controlling for managerial status, despite early arguments that position in the organization is likely to change fairness assessments. Third, the use of control groups allows us to consider if changes in procedural justice perceptions are due to the personnel reforms or reflect governmentwide trends. US Office of Personnel Management surveys covering a 10-year period are analyzed using a difference-in-differences-in-differences model. Results indicate that manager and employee perceptions of procedural justice are different over the time period, these perceptions change in different ways in response to the reforms, and the observed changes are unique from governmentwide trends.

This article builds on recent literature on political settlements and new institutional economics to suggest a “good-fit” alternative to the “best practices” approaches that until recently have dominated efforts at governance reform. It introduces a typology for distinguishing systematically among different groups of countries and maps the typology to four alternative approaches to governance reform. The article then offers a set of “good-fit” hypotheses as to the conditions under which each of the approaches is likely to be effective.

Accountability mechanisms are among the most important means with which governments guard and improve the performance of public sector organizations. However, research documents a plethora of accountability-failures. A key issue is: how can public sector accountability become more effective? This paper seeks to answer this question by connecting two largely separated strands of research: public administration research on real-world organizations and experimental research on the effects of different forms of accountability on decision-making. The paper develops the Calibrated Public Accountability-model (CPA-model) from experimental research findings which can be used to investigate how accountability can be calibrated to task requirements of organizations.

Although research on public service motivation (PSM) is vast, there is little evidence regarding the effects of PSM on observable behavior. This article contributes to the understanding of the behavioral implications of PSM by investigating whether PSM is associated with prosocial behavior. Moreover, it addresses whether and how the behavior of other group members influences this relationship. The article uses the experimental setting of the public goods game, run with a sample of 263 students, in combination with survey-based PSM measures. A positive link is found between PSM and prosocial behavior. This relationship is moderated by the behavior of other group members: high-PSM people act even more prosocially when the other members of the group show prosocial behavior as well, but they do not do so if the behavior of other group members is not prosocial.

While many scholars have discussed the merits of collaborative governance, especially for addressing complicated modern policy challenges, the literature has paid less attention to how business can serve as an effective collaborative partner during the formation of mandatory policies and regulations. Drawing on scholarship in the management sciences and combining it with literature in public administration and public policy, the authors elaborate on four distinct types of business responses to proposed regulations based on degrees of political activity and social responsiveness: defensive, reactive, proactive, and anticipatory. They then characterize the reasons why proactive firms are more likely to be valuable collaborative partners with policy makers and public managers: their engagement may avoid costly stalemates that frequently hinder policy making and help develop cost-effective, flexible policy approaches to complex social problems.

Purpose: This paper tries to explore theoretically and empirically which institutional factors (including good governance ones) help Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in providing better infrastructural services, which would then in their turn lead to attracting more private investment for the whole economy.
Design/methodology/approach: On the theoretical level, while a focus is put on discussing the institutions that should be responsible for PPP success, reconciliation is being attempted between institutional economics from one side and the new public management and networks management perspectives from the other. Empirically, OLS multivariate panel regressions test the suggestions of the theoretical discussion with emphasis on interaction terms between PPP and the studied institutions.
Findings: Evidence is found that good governance institutions, and specifically good regulatory quality, bureaucratic efficiency and independence, help PPP in performing well as evident from their positive effect on investment growth.
Research limitations/implications: The limitations of this paper are mainly empirical. Further results with great policy implications could have been obtained if better proxies were developed for a number of variables. Certainly this is the case for the proxies used for cronyism and PPD.
Practical implications: Tackling bureaucratic effeciency and independence and higher regulatory quality should be a top priority if the great positive externalities resulting from PPP in infrastructure are to be realized.
Originality/value: The novelty of this research is attributed to constructing a proxy for PPP, as well as testing empirically the effect of the interactions of PPP with other institutional variables on the performance of infrastructural services (as evident from attracting more investment). The synthesis between the literature on PPP, new public management, networks, good governance and institutional economicss is another aspect of this work. The obtained results suggest important policy recommendations, and, I hope, add to the literature on PPP.

Performance-based management is pervasive in public organizations; countless governments have implemented performance management systems with the hope that they will improve organizational effectiveness. However, there has been little comprehensive review of their impact. This article conducts a meta-analysis on the impact of performance management on performance in public organizations. It contributes to the current literature in three ways. First, it examines the effect of the “average” performance management system. Second, it examines the influence of management: whether beneficial performance management practices moderate the average effect. Third, it examines the effect of “time” on performance management. Using 2,188 effects from 49 studies, the analysis finds that performance management has a small average effect. However, the effect is substantially larger when indicators of best practices in high-quality studies are included, indicating that management practices have an important impact on the effectiveness of performance management systems. Evidence for the effect of time is mixed.

This article takes stock of public service motivation research to identify achievements, challenges, and an agenda for research to build on progress made since 1990. After enumerating achievements and challenges, the authors take stock of progress on extant proposals to strengthen research. In addition, several new proposals are offered, among them conducting more research on the disaggregated construct, developing grounded theory of public service motivation to understand contextual variations across cultures and political institutions, and improving current measures to better capture loyalty to governance regime as an institutional dimension of the public service motivation construct.

A main rationale of performance information is to empower citizens to make informed decisions by presenting them with unambiguous information about the performance of institutions. However, even objective, clear, and unambiguous performance information is subject to biased interpretation depending on whether the information is consistent with the prior beliefs held by those who receive the information. Integrating the theory of motivated reasoning with the literature on performance information, the authors hypothesize that performance information that is inconsistent with prior beliefs is less likely to be interpreted correctly than belief-consistent information. Using randomized survey experiments in which respondents were presented with quantitative performance data, the authors show that subjects systematically interpret performance information in ways that conform with their prior beliefs. The findings question the assumption that providing performance information automatically increases knowledge about government performance, let alone improves political decisions.

During the past decade, there has been an explosion in the literature on performance-oriented reforms around the globe. What are the major topics discussed in this literature? What can scholars and practitioners learn from it? This study provides an overview of the major themes, strategies, challenges, and outcomes of performance measurement and management reforms by reviewing the literature produced during this period. It shows that useful strategies and tools have been developed for public sector organizational performance improvement. Apart from continuing efforts to examine the role of measurement per se, there has been a shift in focus from performance measurement to performance management in this literature. Nevertheless, research evidence from both developed and developing countries shows that most reforms achieve only mixed results, with both costs and gains and with daunting challenges, such as gaming, remaining. The paper concludes by discussing issues that deserve attention from future research.

Because public action matters in all countries and political systems, how it is organised now and in the future must exercise the minds of policy-makers in and beyond government. In response, we argue that there is considerable merit in having a widely applicable analytical lens through which to look at and assess present arrangements and future possibilities. The lens has multiple dimensions, which we address here in terms of three broad approaches to organising public action. We label these approaches as ‘statism’, ‘state–market dualism’ and ‘state–market–civil society synergism’. Their components and distinctive features are discussed, followed by a consideration of significant application issues and concerns. A fundamental matter is how best to balance the demands of public action and organised responses with the requirements of publicness and legitimacy as systems of government and governance are maintained and reformed.

This article examines two attempts at changing civil service policy in Mexico and Guatemala. The purpose of this study is to understand the factors that determine policy change and stability in the public management policy domain, drawing from an analytical framework based on Kingdon, and Baumgartner and Jones, to account for policy change and stability. The article presents narrative accounts of two initiatives that aimed to enact a civil service law in Mexico and another in Guatemala and reveals the institutional configurations that structured the policy processes in both episodes. Policy venues, policy communities, and political parties play key roles in fostering policy change. The study also reveals the roles and interactions of groups and individuals in pursuit of their policy objectives. The activities of policy entrepreneurs as they take advantage of policy windows are particularly relevant. Based on this analysis, explanations for the outcomes are presented, pointing to the determinants of policy change and stability. Beyond the case findings, this article provides an assessment of the ability of two well-established policy theories to explain policymaking in the Latin American context.

Accountability is of growing importance in contemporary governance. The academic literature on public accountability is fraught with concerned analyses, suggesting that accountability is a problematic issue for public managers. This article investigates how public managers experience accountability and how they cope with accountability. The analysis highlights a number of ways in which public managers do indeed “suffer” from accountability, although, conversely, most of the respondents were able to identify strategic coping mechanisms with which apparently problematic accountability requirements can be converted into practically useful procedures.

The Brazilian oil and gas (O&G) sector has experienced institutional changes that put an end to the state monopoly. The purpose of this article is to explain why Petrobras has remained dominant after the sector had been opened to competition. We consider that it is possible to explain this paradox via two ideas that emanate from North’s analysis on institutional change: first, by explaining institutional change as a continuous interrelation between formal and informal institutions and the political and economic organizations involved; second, by considering institutional change as a path-dependent process marked by a dialectic between elements of change and continuity.

We propose and test a theoretical framework concerning the relationship between transformational leadership behaviour and affective commitment to change in a public sector context. We apply change management theory to explain how direct supervisors contribute to processes of organizational change, thereby increasing affective commitment to change among employees. While the change leadership literature emphasizes the role of executive managers during change, we conclude that the transformational leadership behaviour of direct supervisors is an important contribution to the successful implementation of change. Furthermore, the results show how the specific context of public organizations determines the transformational leadership behaviour of direct supervisors.

This study examines public sector change, motivation and person–organization (P–O) fit in a stress context. The results provide empirical evidence that change initiatives produce change-induced stressors. However, change processes, including participation in change decision-making and the provision of change information, increase public service motivation, reduce change-induced stressors and ultimately improve P–O fit and job satisfaction. The results also depict that, in the context of change, public service motivation positively influences job satisfaction, with this relationship partially mediated by P–O fit. Implications for New Public Management and the importance of change processes for reducing workplace stress are discussed.

New Public Management (NPM) has been guiding public sector reform for over 25 years. Its position on the design of effective management control rests on three key ideas: (1) performance improvement requires a results-oriented culture that emphasizes outcomes rather than inputs or processes; (2) public sector organizations need to introduce performance management based on targets, monitoring and incentives; and (3) public sector organizations should decentralize decision rights and reduce their reliance on rules and procedures. Focusing on the particularly influential version of NPM as advocated by the OECD, we examine the validity of these ideas theoretically and empirically. We conclude that NPM’s reform programme should be reconsidered. Although the evidence indicates that a results-oriented culture is positively associated with performance, we find little support for the assumed benefits of NPM-type performance contracting. In addition, the results suggest that both the effects of decentralization and the reliance on rules and procedures are opposite to NPM’s expectations.

Interpersonal networks are increasingly important for organizational learning and performance. However, little is known about how these networks emerge. In this article, exponential random graph models are employed to explore the underlying processes of advice network formation in 15 organizations. The authors examine the influence of (1) structural effects (reciprocity, transitivity, multiplexity), (2) actor attribute effects (job function, tenure, education, self-efficacy), and (3) peer competition. Results suggest that employees rely more on reciprocity, closure, and similarity in job function than on peer expertise or status when seeking advice. In addition, employees who perceive greater levels of competition with peers are significantly less likely to both seek and provide advice. As public organizations look to private sector strategies that promote internal competition to improve efficiency and accountability, public managers need to be aware of the negative implications those strategies can have on interpersonal networks and organizational learning.

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the potential role that performance management could play in enabling employees’ adaptability to change and, therefore, successful change implementation.
Design/methodology/approach: – This research adopted a qualitative case study research design, focussed on seven case studies within the Australian Public Service (APS). This study utilized documentary analysis, semi-structured individual and group interviews.
Findings: – The findings of this research demonstrate that adaptability to change is integral for high performance; however, the constant change faced by many public servants is disruptive. The authors posit that applying a performance framework developed by Blackman et al. (2013a, b) to change implementation will help overcome, or at least mitigate, these issues. The authors argue that applying this framework will: enable adaptability to change; and provide an ongoing management function that enables change to occur.
Research limitations/implications: – This research has been limited to seven organizations within the APS, yet it does reveal interesting implications in terms of the apparent role of performance management in both developing change capacity and supporting espoused outcomes.
Practical implications: – This research identifies the potential role that performance management can play in supporting effective change implementation through enabling employees to cope better with the change through enabling clarity, purpose and alignment with the organizational direction.
Originality/value: – The originality of this paper stems from the synthesis of different strands of literature, specifically high performance, performance management and change management, and empirical research in the public sector to provide a new way of looking at performance management as a change enable

Performance Management is the challenge confronting public service managers. However, the enduring research focus on performance measurement in public services, without resolution, does not offer neat solutions to performance management in public services. This drawback of measurement difficulties has not abated interest in performance management. But there are significant adverse outcomes associated with the clumsy use of performance management systems in public services, particularly negative effects on staff morale. The lack of ready-made answers to performance management makes this task complex and demanding for public service managers. This paper identifies critical dimensions of effectiveness in performance management systems.

Although research on the antecedents of collaboration is vast, no study has examined the effects of public service motivation (PSM). The current study relates PSM to decisions on whether or not to collaborate, while controlling for the Big Six personality traits. Empirical evidence is gathered by means of an experimental design based on three different prisoner's dilemma games. Results indicate that PSM affects collaboration when the individual decides to collaborate or not as a first mover, before knowing what the counterpart decides, and as a second player provided that the counterpart has decided not to collaborate.

Organizational image, identity, and identification are powerful concepts in terms of understanding members’ behaviors and beliefs. In particular, the term “image” has frequently been used to describe the overall impression of the organization, but most scholars have only focused on organizational image as it is perceived by external audiences. However, organizational image as perceived by members within an organization is critical for determining its impact on individual employees’ motivation, work behaviors, and further performance at work. This article explores the roles of organizational image and identification in explaining organizational behaviors—extra-role behavior and absenteeism—in public and nonprofit organizations. A series of seemingly unrelated regressions were used to analyze survey data from 1,220 respondents. Results show that organizational image is positively related to employee identification, and identification has a significant influence on promoting extra-role behavior and lowering employee absenteeism.

This research focuses on the trends in municipal e-governance among large municipalities based on a worldwide survey in 2011. The study replicates previous surveys conducted every other year since 2003 and the longitudinal assessment analyzes specific features of municipal websites. This paper examines these longitudinal trends in terms of four different clusters: 1) digitally mature cities, 2) digitally moderate cities, 3) digitally minimal cities, and 4) digitally marginal cities, and identifies the best practices among them. There were significant changes in the top ranking cities, with Seoul, Toronto, Madrid, Prague, and Hong Kong representing the highest level in e-governance.

This article introduces the importance of equivalence framing for understanding how satisfaction measures affect citizens’ evaluation of public services. Does a 90 percent satisfaction rate have a different effect than a logically equivalent 10 percent dissatisfaction rate? Two experiments were conducted on citizens’ evaluations of hospital services in a large, nationally representative sample of Danish citizens. Both experiments found that exposing citizens to a patient dissatisfaction measure led to more negative views of public service than exposing them to a logically equivalent satisfaction metric. There is some support for part of the shift in evaluations being caused by a negativity bias: dissatisfaction has a larger negative impact than satisfaction has a positive impact. Both professional experience at a hospital and prior exposure to satisfaction rates reduced the negative response to dissatisfaction rates. The results call for further study of equivalence framing of performance information.

Local food system governance increasingly occurs in collaborative venues at the local, state, and regional levels. Prominent examples of such are food policy councils (FPCs). FPCs take a systemic approach to improve local food systems by including diverse stakeholders to advise on policy development. The authors study public FPCs to understand how policies structure the stakeholder composition and goals of FPCs and how FPCs’ stakeholder composition facilitates and/or impedes performance. Data come from a content analysis of policies that mandate the structure and functions of public FPCs and interviews with FPC representatives. Findings indicate that FPCs connected to a broader array of food policy actors in their communities produce more diverse policy outputs, but this outcome is tempered by whether council members represent personal or organizational interests.

Strategic management is widely seen as essential to the public services, leading to better performance and better outcomes for the public. In fact, the private sector idea of strategic management has become so powerful in the public sector that politicians and policy makers have begun to talk about the importance of the modern state being strategic – and we may be witnessing the emergence of the Strategic State.

Strategic Management for the Public Sector draws on experience and research from a range of countries and provides a theoretical understanding of strategic management that is grounded in the public sector. Drawing on the latest theory and research this text provides a fresh look at foresight, analysis, strategic choice, implementation and evaluation. This book also offers original and detailed case studies based on up to date evidence from different public sector settings, helping the reader to build on their understanding of theories and concepts presented earlier in the book.

In recent decades civil service systems have been subject to intense scrutiny and their role brought into question. The 2008 financial crash and the ensuing crisis did nothing to alleviate this pressure and now, caught between increased accountability and a significantly reduced budget, stretched civil service systems are faced with the challenge of getting better results with less funding.

In this expanded and updated edition of a benchmark volume, a cast of international contributors compare and contrast civil services from around the world and the adaptations that have been made in order to cope with the new challenges of running public services in the 21st century. Going beyond the economic crisis and fiscal austerity, this collection provides key insights into important issues such as the impact of multi-level governance, issues of legality, efficiency and responsiveness, juridification, public sector motivation, and the values of civil service systems. Providing a systematic framework for analysis, this collection offers a comprehensive global study of a key government institution.

In addition to public administrations and public managers, there is increasing interest in studying citizens’ interactions with and views toward government from a comparative perspective in order to put theories to the test using cross-national surveys. However, this will only succeed if we adequately deal with the diverse ways in which respondents in different countries and regions perceive and respond to survey measures. This article examines the concept of cross-national measurement equivalence in public administration research and explores methods for establishing equivalence. Two methodologies are examined that test and correct for measurement nonequivalence: multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis and multilevel mixture item response theory. These techniques are used to test and establish the cross-national measurement equivalence of two popular measurement constructs: citizen satisfaction with public services and trust in public institutions. Results show that appropriately dealing with nonequivalence accounts for different forms of biases that otherwise would be undetected. The article contributes to the methodological advancement in studying public administration beyond domestic borders.

An important discussion in the performance management literature is how performance contingent incentives affect goal attainment. Incentivizing management tools are typically implemented to improve performance, but due to motivation crowding they may decrease innovation and performance. This article focuses on public research institutions and uses both existing performance studies of publications and two new innovation studies of patents to investigate effects of both financial incentives and sanctions within and between universities. Our findings indicate that public managers can create an environment supportive of innovation and performance through the use of performance management tools, but that this is no automatic link.

Latin American governments have embarked upon substantial open government reforms in recent years. Working with the Open Government Partnership (OGP), progress has been made. The OECD - as an official multilateral partner organisation of the OGP - has conducted a regional stocktaking exercise of open government strategies and practices. Its main findings are reflected in this report, allowing Latin American countries to compare and benchmark against good international practice.

We analyze the effects of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians, as measured by the average number of years of education. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during this period, we identify two groups of municipalities and use a Difference in differences estimation. We find that gender quotas are associated with an increase in the quality of elected politicians, with the effect ranging from 0.12 to 0.24 years of education. This effect is due not only to the higher number of elected women, who are on average more educated than men, but also to the lower number of low-educated elected men. The positive effect on quality is confirmed when we measure the latter with alternative indicators, it persists in the long run and it is robust to controlling for political ideology and political competition.

This discussion paper summarizes the proceedings at the Second China-Latin America and the Caribbean Policy and Knowledge Summit, focusing on leadership and capacity building for public sector executives. The event, sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Inter-American Development Bank, was held in Beijing and Shanghai, China in 2015. The paper discusses practices related to the management and training of public executives in China, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Peru, and provides a general context for these practices in OECD and Latin American and Caribbean countries. The Summit identified common challenges among the countries, despite the obvious differences in terms of size and history, such as finding a balance between political neutrality and technical capacity and ensuring high ethical standards to address low citizen trust in the public sector.

Improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and openness of governments is essential to meet the key challenges that countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region face to improve service delivery to citizens. This Technical Note is meant to guide the work of the IDB's Institutional Capacity of the State Division in this area. In the literature, institutional quality and implementation capacity emerge as the key variables that underpin good government. Measurement is a central issue, as institutional quality cannot be assessed or improved without reliable indicators. While many challenges remain, the region is already adopting innovative approaches to public management, focusing particularly on the capacity of governments to manage information. In response to existing challenges and progresses, the IDB identifies three main strategic areas of action: (i) improving government effectiveness by strengthening the evidence base for policy making and enhancing the capacity of central agencies; (ii) enhancing efficiency in policy implementation by leveraging the adoption of innovative e-solutions and supporting civil service reforms; and (iii) fostering accountability and open government by strengthening accountability institutions, both internal and external, and promoting the adoption of targeted transparency policies.

During the last decade, the Latin American and Caribbean region has experienced unprecedented natural resources abundance. This book highlights how transparency can help realize the benefits and reduce negative externalities associated with the extractive industries in the region. A central message is that high-quality and well-managed information is critical to ensure the transparent and effective governance of the sector. The insights from experiences in the region can help policymakers design and implement effective regulatory reforms and adopt international standards that contribute to this goal. This is particularly important at a time when the recent boom experienced by extractives in the region may be coming to an end.

During the last decade, the Latin American and Caribbean region has experienced unprecedented natural resources abundance. This book highlights how transparency can help realize the benefits and reduce negative externalities associated with the extractive industries in the region. A central message is that high-quality and well-managed information is critical to ensure the transparent and effective governance of the sector. The insights from experiences in the region can help policymakers design and implement effective regulatory reforms and adopt international standards that contribute to this goal. This is particularly important at a time when the recent boom experienced by extractives in the region may be coming to an end.

Center of Government institutions, which work directly with the Head of the Executive Branch at any level of government, are essential to provide direction and coherence to the government and to ensure the delivery of its priorities and results for citizens. This publication presents the knowledge produced by the IDB on this topic, and includes a novel conceptual framework on this subject, an analysis of the regional trends of Center of Government performance in the region, two case studies of recent innovations at the national (Chile) and subnational (Pernambuco, Brazil) levels, and policy recommendations based on these analyses and on some of the best international practices. The publication also presents a methodological tool (the Institutional Development Matrix) that allows decision makers to diagnose the actual performance of Center of Government functions in their countries, in order to tailor reform initiatives to their specific context and challenges.

This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on citizens' assessment of service delivery performance. The second contribution is the introduction a theoretical framework to understand the pathway of change, the necessary building blocks that are needed for social audits to be effective. Using this framework, the third contribution of this article is answering the following questions: i) under what conditions do citizens decide to monitor government activity and ii) under what conditions do governments facilitate citizen engagement and become more accountable.

Drawing on a case study of recent reforms in the Dominican Republic, this technical note derives lessons about strategies to professionalize the civil service. As in other countries with less professionalized civil services, the Dominican Republic's political economy is biased against reform: promises of public employment tend to be important to successful electoral mobilization. Nonetheless, passage of a new public service law and its partial implementation were achieved. The case study finds that the construction of a broad societal coalition demanding reform may account for this puzzle. For legislative approval, alliance formation extended to not only traditional reform allies, such as the international community, NGOs, business associations, the media, progressive governing legislators and a politically influential minister, but also novel allies, including opposition parties. Reform implementation was fostered by the periodic and well-publicized societal monitoring of an achievable set of reform objectives aligned with the strategic priorities of the Ministry of Public Administration. As a result, political incentives were tilted towards legal reform passage and incremental compliance in civil service subsystems such as organizational structures, information systems and training not perceived as threatening to core electoral mobilization interests, yet not in more politically contentious subsystems, such as recruitment and selection. The case study underscores the desirability of constructing broad societal coalitions to enable civil service professionalization particularly in contexts where potential societal veto actors with vested interests, such as public sector unions, are largely absent. It also underscores the continued weight of political economy constraints in conditioning the subsystems in which civil service reform implementation may be achieved.

The concept of Open Government has emerged as a new public policy
paradigm. It is a response to the rise of a better-informed and more demanding citizenry, which seeks to influence public service design and
provision. The practical dimension of the components of Open Government, above all those related to citizen participation and collaboration, make implementing this paradigm even more complex. Based on a review of the literature, international evidence, and a specific case of co-design and co-execution of a public service at the local level, this paper analyzes the political challenges that the Open Government model poses. Furthermore, it evaluates the incentives, obstacles, and opportunities that the Open Government agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean will have to tackle if it is to be feasible and successful.

This Technical Note describes and analyzes the management model implemented in 2007 by the State of Pernambuco, Brazil. It discusses the model's main features, as well as how and why it was implemented, and suggests opportunities for improvement and institutionalization. It also presents lessons learned for other subnational governments seeking to improve their performance and achieve results for the citizens. The key innovation of the Pernambuco case is the integration of planning, budgeting, monitoring, and intervention through a management model endorsed by the Governor and steered by the Secretariat of Planning and Management (SEPLAG) as the key player within the Center of Government (CoG). The CoG has set clear priorities and developed approaches and capacities to make adjustments and corrections when obstacles are harming performance. It has also implemented routines and technical tools, which appear to be in the process of becoming institutionalized. At the same time, there is room for improvement, mainly in terms of strengthening the model's focus on outcomes and refreshing some of its key components.

The year 2013 has become known as the year of Open Government. The continuing progress of the Open Government Partnership represents the consolidation of a process that, in less than two years, has strengthened the promotion and implementation of public policies. These policies are founded on
the principles of transparency and access to public information, citizen participation, integrity, and the harnessing of technology on behalf of openness and accountability in 63 participating countries. The Latin American and Caribbean region, in particular, stands out with the most widespread participation, including 15 borrowing member countries of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Fourteen of these have action plans in process for the implementation and/or evaluation of these policies, reinforcing
their commitment to open government. Trinidad and Tobago, one of the 15 member countries, will soon present its own action plan. To date, various countries are developing public consultation processes and opportunities for participation for a new two-year period of commitments relating to open government. It is, therefore, worthwhile to review, country-by-country, the commitments that have been carried out and to consider the views expressed by relevant stakeholders. This analysis will further contribute to this emerging domain a new paradigm for public policy and management reform in the 21st century.